Archive for October, 2011

I have a lot of hobby projects, and as a result getting any one of them to a state where I wouldn’t be completely embarrassed to share it takes forever. I started working on pyrabbit around May or June of this year, and I’m happy to say that, while it’ll never be totally ‘done’ (it is software, after all), it’s now in a state where I’m not embarrassed to say I wrote it.

What is it?

It’s a Python module to help make managing and testing RabbitMQ servers easy. RabbitMQ has, for some time, made available a RESTful interface for programmatically performing all of the operations you would otherwise perform using their browser-based management interface.

So, pyrabbit lets you write code to manipulate resources like vhosts & exchanges, publish and get messages, set permissions, and get information on the running state of the broker instance. Note that it’s *not* suitable for writing AMQP consumer or producer applications; for that you want an *AMQP* module like pika.

PyRabbit is tested with Python versions 2.6-3.2. The testing is automated using tox. In fact, PyRabbit was a project I started in part because I wanted to play with tox.

Here’s the example, ripped from the documentation (which is ripped right from my own terminal session):

Hopefully you’ll agree that this is simple enough to use in a Python interpreter to get information and do things with RabbitMQ ‘on the fly’.

How Can I Get It?

Well, there’s already a package on PyPI called ‘pyrabbit’, and it’s not mine. It’s some planning-stage project that has no actual software associated with it. I’m not sure when the project was created, but the PyPI page has a broken home page link, and what looks like a broken RST-formatted doc section. I’ve already pinged someone to see if it’s possible to take over the name, because I can’t think of a cool name to change it to.

Until that issue is cleared up, you can get downloadable packages or clone/fork the code at the pyrabbit github page (see the ‘Tags’ section for downloads), and the documentation is hosted on the (awesome) ReadTheDocs.org site.

Well, it’s that time of year again. The PyCon 2012 Call for Proposals has ended. This means it’s time for the Program Committee to spring into action, evaluating all of the proposals, preparing to champion their favorites, and participating in the interactive meetings that eventually decide the fate of PyCon 2012’s slate of talks, tutorials, and poster sessions.

But… who is the Program Committee?

I asked that question last year. “Who are these people? Is this something I can participate in?” It turns out that *anyone* can join the Program Committee. The genius in the way it works is its simplicity: if you want to be on the Program Committee, you join a mailing list, send an intro email, and you’re added as a committee member.

My first year on the Program Committee was a fantastic experience that served to educate me about the selection process, and to further my conviction that the Python community is the most welcoming, open and inclusive group I’ve ever had the pleasure of being involved with.

So, if you haven’t already, I encourage you to join the Program Committee for this year’s round of meetings to help build what will undoubtedly become the biggest and best PyCon yet.